


Choking On Silence

by stratumgermanitivum



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Canon Queer Character, Canonical Character Death, Homophobic Language, IT Chapter Two Spoilers, Internalized Homophobia, Introspection, M/M, everyone else is just in the background, this is really just Richie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-14 14:36:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20602424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stratumgermanitivum/pseuds/stratumgermanitivum
Summary: He tries saying it once. It’s the 9th grade and everyone is a hormonal mess. And he’s faced down a killer clown in a cavernous sewer beneath a floating mass of corpses, so really, nothing ought to scare him anymore.I’m gay,Richie thinks, staring himself down in the bathroom mirror.I’m gay. I’m a faggot. I’m a giant homosexual.





	Choking On Silence

**Author's Note:**

> This is barely a fic, just me coping with my FEELS as my ship simultaneously sailed and died within fifteen minutes of movie.

“You should have been a girl,” His mom said to him once, drunk and dazed on the couch, “You were supposed to be a girl. We had everything planned out.”

_Well, mom_, Richie thinks, years later, _I could still bring you home a son-in-law, does that count?_

It’s the kind of lost, hysterical thought he can’t actually put a voice to, can’t even dwell on for more than a second before it twists low and icy cold in his belly. He has a lot of those, actually.

He tries saying it once. It’s the 9th grade and everyone is a hormonal mess. And he’s faced down a killer clown in a cavernous sewer beneath a floating mass of corpses, so really, nothing ought to scare him anymore.

_I’m gay_, Richie thinks, staring himself down in the bathroom mirror. _I’m gay. I’m a faggot. I’m a giant homosexual._ He even opens his mouth and lets the tip of his tongue slide over his teeth. The words don’t come out. They get stuck somewhere in his chest like a painful lump of mashed potatoes, thick and unwieldy no matter how much he swallows.

“I’ve been in love with Eddie Kaspbrak since the 3rd grade.” That comes out a little better, a little easier. It’s always easier, with Eds. It’s still a choking, garbled mess that makes Richie feel a little like he’s vomited it up instead of saying it, but it’s audible, at least. At least to himself.

He doesn’t say it to anyone else, though. Their group is entirely dudes since Bev moved away and stopped writing, and Richie can _see_ it already, can see disgust in their eyes if he tells them, can hear them wondering if every single time they stripped down to swim, Richie was eyeing them up.

_As if, assholes_, Richie thinks with a slightly manic grin, _as if I’d waste this much prime masculine energy on any of **your** asses._

_(Eddie, once. Just a peek, in the 11th grade. Just one glimpse, he can’t help himself, he’s thought about it for so long, and Eddie’s only grown obnoxiously cuter with time. Just a peek in the locker room after gym, and Richie is so unbearably nauseated with himself that he skips out on a Loser’s Club movie night and hides himself in his room for the rest of the week.)_

One day, on his own, Richie tells the kissing bridge. _R + E_, and in his head, he thinks, _I’m gay and I’m in love with Eddie Kaspbrak._

Eddie’s mom moves him down to New York the summer before senior year. He promises to write, and he does.

Once.

Just like Bev and Ben and Bill before him.

They don’t say anything, the three of them left, but they all know it. It’s this town, it’s this _fucking_ town with its sewers and clowns and the thick stench of death.

They get drunk one night. They skip out on prom entirely. Stan got turned down, Richie had never intended to go in the first place, and no one invited the homeschooled black boy to prom in a place like Derry.

Instead of prom, they sprawl out under the stars in the bed of Mike’s grandpa’s pick-up truck. Wasted and somber, truths spill out of them like water.

“I’m not going to leave,” Mike confesses, “Not after high school, not ever. I said Florida, I _wanted_ Florida so badly. But I’ll be here, with the sheep. I’m not even applying. It’d kill my grandfather. I’m all he has left.”

That aches almost as much as everyone leaving has. At least when everyone forgot about them, they had the hope that the rest of them would go too.

Stan, always so shaky, sounds absolutely confident when he whispers, “There is no God. Not the Christian one. Not the one my dad always told me about. None. There can’t be a god and still be things like… Like _It_.”

Neither Mike nor Richie has an argument for that.

_I’m gay_, Richie doesn’t say, _I’ve been in love with Eds since we were kids._ It’s screaming in his head, begging to get out and bubbling up in his throat like thick, sticky tar, and he hates himself he hates himself he _hates himself_.

“I really thought he’d remember _me_, at least,” Richie says instead, and neither of them have to ask who he’s talking about.

“Yeah,” Stan says, “Yeah, I thought he would too.”

And then they graduate. And then they leave. Derry in the rearview mirror, and Richie will spend the next four years thinking up reasons not to come home for the holidays, until finally his parents leave Derry altogether.

27 years. 27 years, and Richie doesn’t say it. He cracks jokes about his girlfriend on stage and thinks loudly at the audience. _I’m gay! I’m gay, and…_

He thinks there used to be more to it than that, but his brain gets twisted up around the first part and he never does remember the rest.

In a Chinese restaurant in Derry, he sees Edward Kaspbrak for the first time in decades, and it _hits _him, hits him so hard he feels like he’s dying.

_Oh, _he thinks, _oh **fuck** I’m in love with you. I’m so in love with you it kills me sometimes. Loving you has kept me awake at night for 27 years and I didn’t even remember your name._

And Richie. Says. Nothing.

Well, he talks, of course he talks, he’s the Trashmouth, but it’s all useless ramble, jokes about Eddie’s mom and Eddie Spaghetti, and all the bullshit he spent most of their childhoods spewing. Eddie claps back with a mountain of fucks and a grin on his face so wide that it stabs Richie right in the chest.

Just like It stabs Eddie. Splits him open wide and throws him to the ground, and Richie cannot get to his side fast enough.

_I’ve been in love with you since the 3rd grade_, he thinks but does not say, because Eddie is _counting on him_ and Richie is gonna tear this fucking clown apart. There will be plenty of time, there will be _decades_ to tell him later.

There is no later.

There is only the rubble, where the Neibolt Street Crackhouse used to stand. Only goodbyes and hugs and pretty words and promises to remember this time.

Only Richie, on the kissing bridge, curled up into a ball and sobbing as he etches the letters just a little bit deeper. _I was in love with you. I was so in love with you, and you should have known._

Later, his manager suggests time off. He suggests a vacation. He suggests a therapist.

Richie, moving through life in a haze of guilt and only ever answering the phone for Bev, makes the appointment.

“I’m gay,” He tells her. “I’m gay, and I’ve been in love with my best friend since I was eight years old, and he died last summer.”

“Well,” she says, with a soft smile and not even a blink, “that sounds like a good place to start.”


End file.
